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At the end of the 2013-year, YouTube Rewind released a mash-up video filled with last year’s viral YouTube sensations. More than sixty YouTube celebrities starred on this video, which featured pop-culture references and cameos in ten different worldwide locations.
Based on Ylvis’s hit parody song, “What Does the Fox Say?” the video centered around the rewind symbol. Regarding the framework, Nate Houghteling, the Executive Producer at Portal A, explained that “the mechanism that [they] came up with was the ‘rewind button.’ It’s a little bit like the moment before you click a link to a YouTube video by email or on social media and you don’t know what’s going to happen. There’s a lot of expectation and excitement. You know that madness is about to be unleashed.” The video-making process took about ten weeks with the help of Google and YouTube. The video hit 40 million views within a week.
The video portrayed 2013 as a year of dancing, as shown by Miley Cyrus twerking at the MTV Music Awards, people dancing to the Harlem Shake, Korean rapper Psy’s mob dance, and Evian’s dancing baby commercial. Other top trending videos included the ridiculous “How Animals Eat Their Food” by the YouTube comedian MisterEpicMann and multiple videos with goats screaming like humans. The most popular music videos during this year were the following: Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball” and “We Can’t Stop”, Psy’s “Gentleman”, Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky”, and Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” featuring T.I. and Pharrell. Regarding one of the many parodies and controversies to Thicke’s big hit, Youree Choi (10) comments, “A parody switched the characters altogether, which really appealed to me because while the original song was so hyped and trendy, this one almost allowed people to snap out of their disillusionment that the objectification of women is expected. It turned the tables and seeing how people reacted to the video was interesting.”
With this final piece summing up the entirety of 2013, people around the world could visualize how trends have evolved to this present day. Kevin Wei (12), a YouTuber himself, reflects over this year’s success and states, “I’m really excited to see what kind of year 2014 will be. This year brought up so many new ideas and opinions and I definitely hope that next year can do the same.” According to YouTube Rewind, we can expect 2014 to introduce exciting trends and infinite surprises.
